


do not go gentle into that good night

by antebellumera



Category: Eyewitness (US TV)
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Poetry in the Form of Prose, this show is a glorious menace that i cry myself to sleep over on the daily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 04:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8476021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antebellumera/pseuds/antebellumera
Summary: happiness (hap — ee — nis) noun : good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy.Philip's happiness is written on the corner adjacent to a thin-lipped, crooked smile.





	

_wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,  
_

_and learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,  
_

_do not go gentle into that good night_

 

Happiness is written on the corner adjacent to the thin-lipped smile that Philip cannot look at directly, a crease indented into the dimpled right corner of Lukas’ chin; underneath the frosty eyes is another whisper cut from the same cloth as that happiness, whispered into points across the dark circles that grow into blacker and more defined craters with each coming day. Philip fixes his gaze onto the shadows and crevices of Lukas’ face for fear that looking into his eyes and staring at his mouth would tempt him into treading onto forbidden territory.

Falling feels more like drowning. He is not plummeting through an expanse of open, clear air; he is submerged in a deep pool of impossibly thick water that floods his nostrils, blinds his eyes, wraps thick arms around him and drags him down, forces him to sink. There is no bottom to reach there — there is only infinite falling, falling, falling. Philip is impatient by nature, a fan of gripping life on his own accord and declaring his next move several steps before they are taken. If good things truly come to those who wait, that would make this whole existing jargon nothing but a dupe. He’d rather live in a world where good things come to people who take what they want, who are willing to lay a claim on their own good things.

That, he believes, is the true poetry of life.

“You always look at me all goofy.” Lukas’ mutter rings in his memory, a faux snide twang in his tone. Philip may be imagining — may be projecting, or letting rose colors flood his senses — but beyond the initial sharpness there, the constant rebuffs, and the fist that has sent him spiraling down there is a tender note. An _I’m sorry_ in every movement Lukas makes to avoid meeting him in the same path. To deflect the stare Philip always directs at him. _I’m sorry_.

Do dreams come true? Maybe Philip isn’t an optimist, but some part of him always dared hope that some happiness —or some kind of substance resembling happiness — would find its way to him eventually. The kid with the druggie for a mother, growing up like a hooligan in lieu of an absent father’s discipline — that kid always has a happy ending in the movies, or the books he read while waiting in the school library so he could avoid going home for just a moment longer (a home either filled with unnerving silence or a painful cry far too loud). Those kids were the kids who ended up with the white picket fence lives, looking over their shoulders at the days of their youth and reflecting on the tide of misfortune that carried them gracelessly to the shore of peace.

Lukas looks at him not like a dream but like a scared little boy aching to escape from the entanglement of a nightmare, legs crossed in a half-witted attempt to keep himself from wetting the bed and yelling for his mother to rise from the grave, to save him from this _feeling_.

Philip comes to believe that maybe not all dreams are meant to come true. That maybe reality wants to act on its own, separate from childish whims and fantasies, and shove its own plan into his face.

(“Do you dream?”

“What the shit kind of a question is that?”

“Well. Do you?”

“Of course I fucking do. The psych teacher said we’d, like, _die_ if we didn’t dream. Or something like that, who knows.”)

In Philip’s dreams he presses kisses down on thighs, the fold of a knee, the sharp jawline that falls open unwittingly at his touch. The dreams started out raw, lined with the immature reaction of a young boy lusting after the tall boy with the curves and the impossibly crooked smile. He’d wake, aghast, wrapped in sticky and damp sheets. A body to crave. A moan to hear.

His biggest issue is how far he’s come since then. None of that resonates within him anymore. That moan is a melody, and Philip wants nothing more than to be a composer.

This is the exact kind of fuckery that would send Lukas running for the nearest strip club, if only to gawk at the bare ladies leaving and scare some heterosexuality into his trembling muscles and the bulge in his pants that Philip felt jutting against his own for a matter of glorious seconds, dry humping like the kids they are with their hair bouffant against cream-colored sheets, cold against their bare backs. He can’t meet Philip in the middle. Philip knows what he has got to do, knows he’s going to have to make strides to meet Lukas as far in his corner as he’ll let him. This isn’t like making out with some anonymous stranger in the G Hallway at his old urban high school for the sake of a half-full pack of cigarettes, nothing but imposing teeth and tongue and a palm against his barely there erection, steady sailing until they got bored. Lukas is a different brand of harsh — there is stone upon stone half-covering a genuine tenderness, a red pumping muscle peeking through the cracks with terror-struck eyes. Philip wants to bury himself underneath the stone and cradle the muscle; Lukas wants to bury himself, alone, further than he already has.

In the mornings he ventures to the outer edges of the farm, covered up in layers. He’s not used to air this clear, so free of smog and pollution that he does — in his more poetic moments — dare to liken it to the freshness of a clear water crystal on a verdant blade of grass, or a diamond displayed within glass that has just been polished. Once in his life he thought he may have seen a diamond, a flashing gleam of silver on his mother’s finger as she scurried out into the city night — her preferred time to meet with wolves who bore vials of wicked poison in the form of powder. It disappeared after that. He may have been dreaming.

Perhaps a few tears roll off his eyes when he is alone, away from the magistrate of peers that seeks to impose judgment on his every move. But no one save himself sees this, and even then he chooses to wipe the tears away from the slate of his mind. He has to let himself settle. Has to allow his stampeding heart to reach some kind of consensus with the world around him if he ever wants to stop the seemingly insatiable vibrating of the nerves in his calves telling him to run, run away from this tortured place. There is more corruption here than in the small fraction of the city he frequented, and less smoke and smog to cover it.

At school he is uninspired, redeemed and placed into higher level classes due only to his standardized testing scores and an inherent inability to fail tests; he is an auditory learner, he absorbs everything he hears and though it impresses teachers, it does little to ease his inability to sleep soundly. He scores B’s at the lowest in the uninspired common core courses that feature uninspired architects of the future generation droning at the head of the room. Uninspired. Sans inspiration. Even the school walls are gray, the sky is gray, the sun is hidden. _Pathetic fallacy_. He sits behind everyone else and uses a dull pencil to scratch Johnny Cash lyrics in his tiny neat print right into the cracking wood of a desk purchased on a meager school budget probably around the same time Johnny Cash was still writing the same words he’s writing now. The song trails off, independent of his conscious, and his hand forms the name of his — his what? Can he call him his anything? Can he call him his Anything?

How’d it come to be that another boy’s feelings are suddenly his responsibility? Fuck, he can’t even be trusted to look after himself, though that’s essentially what he has been doing since he started walking and talking. This is meant to be the first time in his life where he _is not_ in charge, where he _is not_ in control, where he _is not_ expected to be an adult in a sixteen-year-old body. The relief of being able to be a child, for just a moment — independence used to taste so sweet in the back of his throat. Now it’s joined the ranks of another burden on his back. Goddamn, but he’s never had the chance to be a child. He didn’t think he’d ever want to be a child, but here he is. And still, in this strange universe of farms and trees that he cannot even begin to wrap his head around, he is the one who has to hold Lukas steady against the rage of the world. Against the rage of reality. Against the rage of trauma.

But who is going to hold Philip?

(In a world of dreams, he reaches out and says, “Hold onto me, let me hold onto you. Come on, man. I can’t do this by myself. Love doesn’t happen by itself.”)

Lukas. Lukas. Lukas. Luk

Class dismissed.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from dylan thomas' poem "do not go gentle into that good night" because i love talking about death in the abstract
> 
> anyway there are only three episodes so idk how to write waldenshea w/ a real plot yet
> 
> catch me in a few weeks w/ some real fic maybe 
> 
> i love philip shea


End file.
